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Messages - cthoman
3101
« on: September 12, 2010, 10:34 »
or did not try hard enough
Trying hard is not easy if you're used to a certain level of income and that plummets when you give up exclusivity.
No offence meant but a lot of people posting this sort of comment ( not all, but quite a few) are not big earners with a lot to lose. If you're only selling a few hundred images a year the reality of moving to a non-exclusive deal is very different to being a big seller at IS. An initial drop in income of , lets say 50% to randomly pluck a figure out of the air if you abandon exclusivity at IS, is manageable if you're earning $200 a month and have a full time job and this is pocket money, if you're earning $2000 a week and paying a mortgage and supporting a family, that's a whole different ball game.
I definitely understand that. It's a lot of money to lose for many people. That's why I'm not rushing to abandon ship, but I do wonder if the decision will be made for some. If enough of those small fries with nothing to lose leave, you start to take the crowd out of crowd sourcing. As an independent, I don't have to worry much about a dip in iStock. Someone will find my images elsewhere. If I was exclusive though, I would definitely be planning an emergency escape plan. You never know when you may have to use it. Being prepared for a disaster is a much better plan than saying it will never happen.
3102
« on: September 11, 2010, 18:17 »
What's the expression? Cutting off your nose to spite your face? I think many of us have to take a more cautious approach because for better or worse, stock has become an integral part of our income. I'd love to dump all these sites that have done me wrong. Then, I could sell it all myself for 100% of the royalties and make even more, but that isn't realistic either.
3103
« on: September 11, 2010, 18:05 »
I don't think it's a question of how much they are making, but where are they spending it all if they need more?
3104
« on: September 11, 2010, 13:55 »
I was going to stop uploading as well. Growth has been kind of garbage everywhere this year, so I need to retool or refocus my operation anyway. Long term, I'm not sure though. I guess I'll wait and see. People seem to be madder at this than any other change, so I'm not sure what the backlash will be yet.
3105
« on: September 11, 2010, 13:48 »
Has anyone else noticed a sharp and unusual increase in their rejections at IS all of a sudden? Like anyone who has been active on this forum?
For the past several weeks leading up to this I have had 100% approval rate. My overall rate there is over 90%. Just today, all of a sudden I had more than a third of images submitted in my last batch rejected. The reasons listed were things like artifacts and/or purple fringing. No attachments were included to show the "problem" areas, and I can't see them on my monitor. Plus images from the same shoots were accepted 100% without exception over the last several weeks.
Very hard not to view this as some sort of retaliation from speaking out here in the forums.
Actually, I was surprised they accepted all of my last batch (no series rejections). I just assumed they sent it through because they wanted to clear off their plate, so they could watch Thursday's NFL game. Probably just random reviewer kindness though.
3106
« on: September 10, 2010, 19:00 »
Yeah buddy, don't think we've forgotten about you and all of Fotolia's shenanigans. We're just distracted with something else right now. You're still on double secret probation.  There definitely was a spoon full of sugar to help the poison go down in most of Fotolia's changes though.
3107
« on: September 10, 2010, 18:33 »
Yeah, mark me down for unacceptable. All these explanations really don't make any sense. Even at 45%, they still make more off of exclusive files than they do non-exclusive files. That's what the change in prices in January did. Exclusives aren't the problem. The math doesn't add up. This really seems to be smoke and mirrors to distract us from the real change which was to lower non-exclusive rates. That's where the real money is. They seem to be avoiding that topic with little or no explanation.
3108
« on: September 10, 2010, 18:15 »
You're welcome.
Yes.
We have to process these bonuses with our normal end of the month royalty payment process, so if we finish your pending D4C files in the meantime, the bonus won't show up on the stats page until we process. Remaining user's bonuses will be posted 9/27-9/28, with payments (assuming you're over the $100 mark) pushed to PayPal or Payoneer on 10/15.
Thanks. With all the bad news lately, that big whopping check will cheer me up. Who says money can't buy happiness?
3109
« on: September 10, 2010, 17:39 »
Dang! I was hoping that was going to pop into my account any day now, but I guess I'll just have to wait until the end of the month. Will it get processed with the end of the month payout? It would be nice to recoup a little cash from my quarterly tax payment that just went out.
Regardless, thanks for the update.
3110
« on: September 10, 2010, 15:55 »
I don't believe for a minute it was not sustainable. Imagine how many sales it would take for everyone to make it to platinum. It's just greed plain and simple, they aren't happy with higher profits, they want higher profits in proportion to revenue. It's all total BS that stems from Getty buying the site and wanting a good return on the investment, even if it means squeezing IStock till the pips squeak.
I'm not sure I believe it either that it is unsustainable. My point was more of why come up with a solution that makes everyone mad? There had to have been a way to do it that would make more or most people happy to drown out all the negatives.
3111
« on: September 10, 2010, 15:40 »
So if it is really true that they can't sustain these levels of commissions, why bother to keep their exclusive program? Isn't it easier to tick off 20% of their contributors rather than 80-100%? Then just raise the prices on all the better selling files or higher canister contributors to exclusive level. And maybe keep an exclusive image program for Vetta. That would allow them to have more higher priced content and everybody would only get 20%. Hell, at that point you could probably bump it up to 1 or 2 percent and still come out ahead.
Maybe not the best solution, but it just seems there could have been so many other solutions that wouldn't make everyone mad.
3112
« on: September 10, 2010, 13:02 »
I found this in the comments of the cnet article and I thought it was interesting: We've got 5531 exclusive contributors in our contributor charts:
base contributors 105 ( 1.9%)
bronze contributors 2417 (43.7%)
silver contributors 1647 (29.8%)
gold contributors 760 (13.7%)
diamond contributors 574 (10.4%)
blackdiamond contributors 28 ( 0.5%) I'm assuming the info came from istockcharts, but what I thought was interesting was that about 75% were Silver and below. Is that where the majority of their 76% unaffected come from? Not to mention about 100% of the 25000+ non-exclusives.
3113
« on: September 10, 2010, 10:41 »
Wow, sumos, you outgrew yourself: two equal posts in the same thread, besides all the other threads!
But I don't like Spam. Anyway... I definitely feel I dodged that bullet too. It was a big bullet that hit a lot of people in January. I'm just happy my inertia was too strong to stay independent (not that that hasn't had its own royalty reductions). I guess going exclusive now would have the advantage that you only have to be pissed off at one agency and not several.
3114
« on: September 10, 2010, 10:20 »
I'm exclusive on i-Stock. My income has been level for months in spite of continued uploading. Recently, I've been getting a lot more rejections. All in all, I've been getting increasingly concerned about iStock but have been hanging on because in 250 more downloads I go gold. I think I'm in for a flat (at best) future on i-Stock as I'll never be able to keep up with the new targets.
So, if I went independant and signed up to, say ten other sites, uploading my 1000 or so photos on i-Stock to them, would this give me the same income? How long would I experience a dip in income for? Presumably other sites have upload limits that would mean I couldn't get all my photos up all at once. I'd welcome anyone else's experience.
Thanks
Jonathan
Nobody can really say how much you are going to make. Everybody has a little bit different mix when it comes to their income. Mine is roughly 30% IS, 30% SS, 10% DT, 10% FT and some others making up the rest. I've been on all these sites for a while, so I'm not sure what it would be like joining today. Upload limits are pretty loose on other sites. I think DT's is around 300 or 400 a week, and I don't think SS or FT have limits. I'm definitely glad I decided not to go exclusive in January. It would have been a lot of work (time wise and financially) just to get stabbed in the back. I feel for all those people that went exclusive to lock in canister levels and because of the new prices. Looking at 5-25% income reductions as an independent isn't too pretty, but being bate and switched as a new exclusive is a dirty trick.
3115
« on: September 09, 2010, 22:38 »
it was stated in the istock forum that Yuri has said he wont reach 1.4M and will drop to 19% (not sure if true though). He was the only one who would have come close. So not sure on who voted here
It could be a mistake or it could be a vector or other contributor (you know those non-photos). 400,000 credits seems somewhat achievable (not for me), but for someone.
3116
« on: September 09, 2010, 14:32 »
Why couldn't Istockphoto just leave their 20% as a base and added more to contributors with more yearly sales? I am sure that would have been fine with most people. And it wouldn't make them "less profitable". Simple as that. If you don't take greed into account.
I have to wonder the same thing. 20% isn't that much. This explanation doesn't really hold water for non-exclusives. They make more off of exclusives sales because of the price difference. Even at 45%. Why take even more from the contributors that can't increase their earnings? Also, they say 76% of exclusives won't lose. What percent of their contributors are exclusive?
3117
« on: September 09, 2010, 11:49 »
I stopped recommending iStock a while ago because my portfolio is so much smaller there due to upload limits. I picked Dreamstime because it is has a larger collection of my work and it isn't mainly a subs site.
3118
« on: September 09, 2010, 11:43 »
So, what they're saying is that they are the most mismanaged business in the industry because they can't maintain the same royalty rates in the rest of the industry despite having higher prices.  I also like how they don't even really mention non-exclusives.
3119
« on: September 08, 2010, 13:37 »
And as mentioned earlier, I think we can do more good by making changes to the way we do business with istock and how we regard them as the top of the heap in microstock, when clearly they should no longer be regarded in such a way.
The problem is when I get my check every month, they are top of the heap. It would be great for these others sites with better policies to overtake the big 4, but that isn't happening without us packing up our toys and leaving. I suppose the path of least risk would be to stop feeding the beasts and feed the young and promising agencies. That may go against the independent spirit of everyone gets everything though. I guess you could try a variety of exclusive collections at individual agencies too (ones that offer image exclusivity). With things being slow this year and more and more agencies pulling BS, I've been thinking more and more about strategies for the future.
3120
« on: September 08, 2010, 09:25 »
Yeah, recommend those other sites like FT and DT because they have never lowered royalty rates on us... oh wait, they have. The list of companies that haven't seems to be getting smaller and smaller.
Edit: Sorry, I know sarcasm doesn't help, but everything that's been happening lately seems bad. I guess my Dash for Cash money will be coming soon, so that should cheer me up.
3121
« on: September 07, 2010, 15:49 »
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, I'll be earning 17% next year at istock.
20% was pretty low in the industry. Less than that is just a joke.
That's what I calculated mine out as too. Applied to my monthly earnings that 3% drop is a pretty serious hit. I just don't get this.
3122
« on: September 01, 2010, 12:33 »
It seems to me that Fotolia (like any other site) wants our images to sell for the most money possible, because they get paid a PERCENTAGE. Why would they not want you to remember to increase your prices again? Would you rather they just delete files that haven't sold in a year?
Well, I probably overreacted a little bit, but it bothers me when everybody gets painted with the same broad brush. Make it optional, so it works for everyone. I'm a little more patient with my files, and a year without a sale is less than ideal but not out of the ordinary. 2 or 3 makes more sense. As far as FT selling things for the most possible, tell that to the tiered vector system that halved a lot of vector prices for contributors. But nobody cared about that because "it didn't affect them".
3123
« on: August 31, 2010, 12:04 »
This isn't going to impact you at all Cthoman. It appears that all your files are set to $1 for XS anyway.
Take care,
Mat
I realize it won't impact me, but I still don't agree with the policy.
3124
« on: August 31, 2010, 10:35 »
Changing the canister levels took away any slight motivation I might of had to reach the diamond level, its too far away now. They actually haven't done this yet as far as I know. I assume it's coming, but those of us that were only a few months away got a reprieve.
3125
« on: August 31, 2010, 09:15 »
This whole thing stinks of another one of Fotolia's "favors" to us. Lots of people want to delete their files, so we are helping you out by lowering the price on them. Then, when they sell, you can go through manually and adjust the prices (If you remember). And for your convenience, it will all be automated, so you'll never know it's happening.
Can I opt out of this now or do I have to wait for more details?
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